( verse | s & m 2.0 )

[caipirinha]

S M O K E & M I R R O R S

Magic is one of those things that should have been left on the side lines, where it had quietly resided for hundreds of years, never brought to the foreground. The problem with things that can be contained and controlled is the fact that people always underestimate what it takes to do just that, to control something so dangerous and addictive, because magic often embodied every fanciful, romantic stereotype with which it was adorned in fairy tales. The possibilities were endless, unfathomably so. What the storybooks often left out, however, was the fact that magic was as alive as any person walking the earth, and just as unpredictable. Magic is a drug worse than anything peddled by well-dressed men with wired eyes in a dark, sweaty corner of a London club, because it isn’t a sticky white powder cooked and cut up in a dodgy kitchen, it isn’t an inherited trait limited to a select few. It’s just a skill you learn like any other, like writing your name or riding a bike. It’s the worst because it’s easy. You’ll hear a myriad of varying accounts relating how magic as a concept ended up in a report on the desk of someone high up in the London Met, and most of them are probably barefaced lies invented by bored PCs daydreaming whilst doing dull paperwork. How it happened and why it wasn’t tossed into a bin followed by raucous laughter – no one knows. The origins have been sealed up, destroyed, messily but securely covered up to try and save reputations and memories in the wake of the disasters that report unleashed. They tried to keep it covert, at first, just an experiment; the practical application of magic to police work. It was astonishing, the range of materials you could utilise to unforeseen effects. Something as simple to acquire as chalk could be powdered into a magical catalyst for thousands of spells (with time, it was found that the best material for magic on the whole was quartz, with a variety of known specific applications discovered for dozens of precious stones). Age old associations with certain objects began to ring with truth. Correct preparation of a spell using the petals of pansies could induce a rather Shakespearean temporary state of dazed infatuation and lightness of being, while spells based on the properties of lilies could preserve a dead body indefinitely, if applied correctly. It was around the mid-sixties that the first whispers of these initiatives crept out of their secret corners in the Met, and by the early seventies, the government had gotten involved – mostly because there were some pretty important people in the US and France not so subtly asking to be clued in. In a way, it spoke to the ego of a post-imperial Britain wallowing in recession and the loss of its perceived greatness. No one was really thinking straight, back then. Certain people just wanted Britain to claw back some of its former glory, and the idea of it being the nation to champion and pioneer the introduction of magic into the wider world, well… it was too good to resist. When the use of magic in the Met finally went public in 1976, there was an international uproar on an unprecedented scale. Some countries immediately denounced the practice and criticised Britain for embarking upon a scheme that was not only insane, by their understanding, but could be devastating if passed on to the military, a means that could create delusions of grandeur in this ailing island nation. It was one hell of a claim, to say the least. All Britain could do to reassure its critics was to issue a statement outlining that magic was only sanctioned for use within the police force and its various branches, for domestic issues (it wasn’t very reassuring at all, realistically speaking). As the old adage goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It’s not much nowadays to say that it did begin with the very best intentions in mind. The use of magic honestly helped, for the first twenty five years. The Met loved it, even if there were a few dissenters amongst their ranks who resented the introduction of magically trained detectives, but there always are. The truth is that it made police officers’ jobs much easier, and it genuinely saved lives and brought people to justice. Magic could be used to accurately reconstruct how crimes were perpetrated, to unearth forensic evidence that might otherwise have been missed, and even to dig around in the recent memories of witnesses and extract completely accurate images of what they saw. It took a while for anyone to realise the addictive properties of magic, though. It was a very gradual and pervasive sort of addiction, one that really wrapped itself around your mind, because once you learned how to do something with magic, it made all the possibilities blossom in your mind. In a strange way, it made the user more intelligent, because they would be possessed with the need to think outside of the box for ways to streamline magic, to make it more effective, to simply do more with it. Once you cast one spell, you would want to cast another. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. Some people were always better at disciplining themselves than others. It was around 1984 that the rehabilitation programmes were introduced. There was no medication that could help alleviate the desire to feel that buzz of energy beneath your fingertips again, the warm shiver down your spine that magic provided, and to this day there still isn’t (you would be extremely hard pressed to find someone to fund that kind of research, anyway). Immersive therapy was devised, a prolonged set of one on one sessions designed to slowly wean a magic user off of the magic high. No one could ever describe the sensation properly, which is to say, everyone felt something different when using magic. That was one of the intoxicating things about magic. As a living, self-interested concept bent on its own development, it would mould itself to every individual user. A unique high. You couldn’t really get much better than that. As the years went on, the rehabilitation programme proved effective at keeping confessed addicts from running amok, and advanced screening tests were introduced as a standard for all those applying to be taught magic within the police. There was an unsurprising surge of people applying for jobs in the police all over Britain following the official legalisation, so to speak, of the practice, and as a result it became infinitely harder to succeed with such applications. It meant that the British police acquired some brilliant minds over the years, but having a brilliant mind did not mean that you were at all suited to using magic. It was almost impossible to stop magic from getting out to the public. Just like any other drug, a market began for it. People paid good money for access to magic, more money than an average police officer (even a magic user, prized as they were) made in an annual salary. Even something as harmless as showing your little sister the most basic of spells meant that the knowledge of how to use magic was seeping into the broader spectrum of life. All a schoolchild had to do was steal a piece of chalk from by the blackboard and they were already halfway there, remember? Using magic in Britain became a criminal offence in 2006. It all degenerated very quickly, between then and 1999. The new millennium had been brought in with the realisation that crime lords lurking in the British undergrowth had acquired a bevy of magical skill for themselves, because as effective as magic was for solving crimes, it was just as effective for committing them. In a way, it’s quite impressive that magic was kept out of the hands of dangerous individuals for so long (on such a large scale, at least). Over half the officers and detectives within British police forces nationwide were immediately sacked and almost brutally rehabilitated, regardless of whether they showed signs of addiction or not, and the crackdown on magic has been a war waged on British streets for eight years now, but there’s no end in sight, not yet. A new underworld has been forged, and its reaches are still expanding, slowly but surely, all in the name of black magic.